Tracks

Love As Hazard And Love As The Only

Words by Sean Moeller, Illustration by Johnnie Cluney, Recording engineered by Ian Grimble and Richard Matthews of Communion Music at 2KHz, Crouch End, London

Fighting to love and loving to fight sums it all up here, even if there are never any real conclusions to be had. For My Darling Clementine songs, there's no separating the two thoughts. The sentence could just be looped, over and over again, if you were asked to very quickly and accurately describe what's happening here, what these people - of questionable sanity - are going through. It could just trail off, like a faded ribbon, into the distance, with the words fighting and loving getting smaller and smaller until they could no longer be seen, until they were simply remembrances, though the clanging of them, the sounds of skin on skin and truncated emotions would boom through the valleys and into hills that stood in their ways.

Michael Weston King and Lou Dalgleish write songs that are essentially about people who can't help themselves. They are classic country scenarios where two people do and don't know what's good for themselves. They're attracted to one another for inexplicable reasons. Some of them they thought they could explain, but when they get right down to thinking about them, they draw blanks. It's not that they should belong with one another, it's just that there's nothing to definitive to what they are other then a surging and unrelenting feeling that they're supposed to be together. They're oil and water. They're bees and those allergic to them. They're hands and their gloves. They're soul mates and they're the exact opposite of that - something that's more in the family of food poisoning.

The love in these songs is wounded, sometimes severely. And sometimes, it's the people who have loved who are in horrible shape, perhaps never to bounce back from the things that love has brought them. One song here is described by King as "an everyday tale of domestic disharmony and occasional violence." The song ends in a death. It could have very well ended in more love - a continuation - and there would have been only a slightly noticeable difference.